Minor Note: Not Just Green — OZONE Asylum, home of the Mad Scientists

Minor Note: Not Just Green

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Your Text: Insert Slimies » Insert UBB Code » Close Last Tag \| All Tags UBB Help	Heh. Just goes to show you how people in the same culture can speak entirely different languages. Did you try presenting her with a bunch of swatches and asking her to pick out "rich" colors and earth tones? I'm especially curious on the second one. "Earth tones" is a term that gets thrown around a lot, but I've never actually heard anyone explain it. I guess everyone just comes to their own conclusion--leading to difficulties such as yours. For the record, dictionary.com gives two definitions: "Any of various warm, muted colors ranging basically from neutral to deep brown." "Any of various rich warm colors with tones of brown." So basically we're dealing with brown, although what kind of brown is not exactly clear. I get the warm part--even I can grasp the concept of warm and cold colors. The first definition say they are "muted," though, while the second definition says they are "rich." How do you explain terms like this in RGB or HSL. My first thought would be that "rich" colors are highly saturated colors, but that can't be everything. Maybe you need a lot of saturation and not too much luminosity for a rich color. That would be my best guess. And what about muted? I've heard this term used with color a lot, but I realize now that I don't really know what it means. Again, dictionary.com has this to say: to mute: "to reduce the intensity of (a color) by the addition of another color." Hmm... so I guess in terms of RGB a muted color would not be a pure color... but brown isn't a "pure" color anyway, not in the RGB of CMYK color models. I suppose it is referring to mixing pigments, but I don't know how any of this helps figure out what a "muted" color really is. A quick scan of Google Image results for "earth tones" shows that people have a wide variety of opinions on the matter. Some people stick to the brown theory, whereas others toss in dark greens and reds. I suppose, like other color terms, it really is rather subjective. Probably the only way of guaranteeing that you're going to get the color your clients want is to have them pick from color swatches--even then, though, you have to deal with the difference in color perception depending on surrounding colors. Color swatches are often shown in isolation, but colors themselves rarely appear that way in designs. My heard hurts now. (Crap. I just noticed that the Chinese characters in my previous post came out as numeric entities. I believe reisio posted something about this recently, but I can't remember what the answer was.) Loading...
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